Gadgetory

two years ago Nesta made thermostats cool the Nest Learning Thermostat built by iPod creator Tony Fadell and a team of engineers he recruited from Apple Google and the rest of the industry added real smarts to a product that most people never thought about and brought the idea of a connected home into relatively affordable reality now nest is introducing its next reinvention of an unloved home device the smoke detector it's called the nest protect and it's a rounded square with a big butt in the middle surrounded by a ring of LEDs when it detects smoke it tells you emergency there's smoke in the living room and you shut it off just by waving it no more climbing up ladders deal with false alarms no more wondering which room the beeping is coming from you can just look at the nest app on your phone we think that this is a product that if we talk to the family's other families they need this because they are has turned about Co they're concerned about smoke they don't want to be woken up they hate the product but they know they have to have so let's try to make it enjoyable let's try to make sure it's not annoying the nest protect is designed to stand out I mean it's a square not a circle like most other smoke detectors that's a big departure for Fidel and his team who are famous for other circles like the original iPod click wheel and the nest thermostat itself we don't want to just be known for run products they actually a lot of smoke alarm that I around and we were to differentiate ourselves from from all the ones and I think that one thing you can tell by this product is nobody would mistake it for any other smoke alone but smarts and clever design come at a price the protector cost $129 for about $100 more than the average smoke detectors sold in your local hardware store the protect is packed with sensors there's a light sensor and ultrasonic motion detector and activity sensor a heat sensor and of course a carbon monoxide detector and a smoke sensor the smoke sensor is actually custom nest designed its own smoke chamber so the protect could sense a wider range of smoke than other products and if you have a nest thermostat it'll collect data from the activity sensors and then protect so more accurately figure out when you're away and adjust your heating and cooling accordingly and if there's a carbon monoxide alert the protect will instruct your thermostat to shut off the furnace a common source of those problems once the protect gathers all this information from its sensors the focus is on communication the protect constantly checks itself every 10 minutes if something goes wrong it speaks out loud and sends an alert to your phone that could be a smoke or carbon monoxide alert or it could just be a low battery warning what we've had to do with engineer we're using incredibly low-power microprocessor the first time they probably ever been used so 6ss lost multiple years yes Wow yes how many years the regulations are not allowed me to tell you what our claim is because we can't make a claim they have to test for multiple years before we can make it really but we've designed it for multiple years on six dollars on six double-a lithium Wow all of that is controlled by not one but two processors there's a first simpler system that controls just the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and there's a second more complicated system that controls all the in connected features like the Wi-Fi radio the voice interface and the motion sensors so beyond the safety how are you kind of getting that that first experience at that ongoing experience of having an S product it like is delightful nicely promised it's the ability for nest protect to actually detect that you're flipping a switch and the light is shutting off when you do that is gonna glow either green when everything's fine meaning the sensors are okay the battery is fine the connection is fine and you know you're being protected what is gonna blow yellow and then at that point you can weigh that it and you can actually tell you what's going on do you need to replace the batteries it will tell you so as well the other emotional thing is we wanted you to be safe not just when there's emergency but all the time so today when you walk down the hallway to go to the bathroom in the night you either turn on the lights or you step on your kids toy that's in the hallway so instead as you walk under the nest protect it will turn on path like to glow and light your way as you go through it just like the nest thermostat does but you can't just release a new smoke detector out of the market various agencies around the world have to certify that it's actually safe here in the US that process is handled by the underwriters laboratories or ul and that's spent nearly a year testing and refining to protect to make sure it passed all the tests so we can't just rush it out to market and say oh yeah trust us it's stacks and stacks of tests that need to be run and you were in the final final throes of certification right what is paying an extra hundred dollars for smoke detector really worth it after all every other smoke detector on the market is vast the same tests and I'm like the nest thermostat there's no promise the protect will save you money or energy overtime it also feels like there should be more communication between nest products once you've got all these sensors in your home you should be able to do something with it just like we did with the iPod you know you started with just music and they added all kinds of things over time with a thermostat we started with a thermostat we added all kinds of features over time you don't strike me as the kind of guy who quotes you strike me as the kind of guy who knows what the next move is we're starting where we start who knows what else can be added over time